Author: Neil Richards

Tim’s interesting recent post on naming made me think about other strange naming laws, and I was reminded more of some of the intricacies of the French system, in which there is an approved government registry of names (no calling your sons Anakin, Monsieur!). In this vein, the Times recently reported on a peculiar extension of this rule to pig-naming: In France, it is apparently illegal to call your pig Napoleon. Such a law would be a very easy case under American free speech jurisprudence, as it is not only a content-based restriction on political speech, but also arguably viewpoint-based. I wonder whether it would also apply to George Orwell’s Animal Farm, in which the principal villain is a Berkshire Boar named Napoleon. Curiously, in the French translation of the novel, he is named Cesar instead, which was apparently a concession to the political controversy that calling a pig “Napoleon” in France would have created, even in a novel.